


In the Ice Beneath the Shores

by Muccamukk



Category: Marvel Noir
Genre: Discovery, Exploration, M/M, Slice of Life, Unresolved Tension, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22142344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Investigating a strange report for Fury, Tony and Rhodey find something unexpected.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 16
Kudos: 71
Collections: You Gave Me A Stocking 2019





	In the Ice Beneath the Shores

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vorkosigan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorkosigan/gifts).



"It's getting colder," Tony said, though he didn't pause in his trek down the tunnel. His flashlight was starting to catch the gleam of frost crystals on the tunnel walls—little rainbows of light all around them. "It shouldn't be below freezing this far from the surface. Especially not in Virginia in August."

"Shouldn't be this dry this far under the water table, either, sir," Rhodey complained. Tony rolled his eyes. You nearly drown a man a couple of times, and he becomes downright paranoid, in Tony's opinion. "There aren't any pumps, that I can hear," Rhodey added almost gloomily.

"Could be magic," Tony offered. They were making their way forward and down with all reasonable care—Tony was an adventurer, not an idiot—but had yet to encounter traps, barriers or any other sign of life since they'd gotten the capstone open. "Or technology that looks like magic."

"Could be," Rhodey said. He had the longer stride, and sped up a little, pushing around a corner ahead of Tony. He hadn't even fully turned before he jumped back with an oath.

"What is it?" Tony rushed forward, foot skidding on the ice so that he slide into Rhodey, who caught his arm around his shoulders. "What?" he asked again.

"Ah, nothing," Rhodey said. He jerked his chin ahead, and this time Tony would have startled if he hadn't been very good at repressing that kind of thing. "It's frozen."

That was an understatement. The creature was encased in a block of ice, like it'd been cut out for a display: some sort of big cat leaping forward towards whoever came around the corner, its snarling jaws wide.

"That a mountain lion?" Tony asked, approaching it carefully. He had no idea what could freeze an animal so quickly it was trapped in mid motion like that, but perhaps it had been posed and then the ice frozen around it. "Aren't they extinct around here?"

"That's the least of my problems with all this, sir," Rhodey said, also examining the cat trapped in ice. Alive, it could easily have put its front paws on his shoulders like a great Dane. Right before it ripped his throat out.

Tony was already turning away, shining his flashlight down to the next bend in the tunnel. Once they were past the guard lion, the passage straightened out and levelled. From there, along each side stood an endless row of slabs of ice, one facing the other like portraits in a great gallery hall. Some contained whole flocks of shorebirds frozen in mid-flight, one a black bear, another a crocodile. Rhodey whistled in appreciation, making his way down one side of the tunnel as Tony worked the other.

"That's a great auk," Rhodey said. "I know for sure that one's extinct, sir, and these are passenger pigeons."

"It's like a natural history museum." Tony shone his light into the face of a frozen boa constrictor and shuddered. "None of this accounts for the reports of strange lights over the island that General Fury asked me to look into."

Rhodey made a non-committal noise and quickened his pace down the hallway of frozen creatures. "Wait'll we tell Miss Potts about this. This has to have been her for..." he started, but broke off. "Sir!"

Tony had been examining the pigeons, trying to work out if they were stuffed ones from a museum, or if they were actually forty years old, but Rhodey's tone jerked him away and down the corridor.

"Sir," Rhodey said again, tone urgent. "There's a _person_ in here."

There was. It was a man frozen in as life-like a pose as the mountain lion, mid stride, his hand reaching out as though to catch something, mouth open in a scream. Tony shivered, his hair standing on end. Surely whoever had made this place must have frozen this man, not posed him. Either way, they'd kept him on display for who knew how long.

"He's a soldier," Rhodey said. "A Blue Coat."

Tony frowned, shining his flashlight down over the body. The man had blond hair under his cloth cap, and a strong physique built for speed as well as power. He was wearing a nondescript tan overcoat, caught in mid-billow, but under it Tony could see what Rhodey meant: the blue tunic of a Union Army infantryman in the Civil War. It wasn't a uniform anyone had worn in at least fifty years. Or Tony didn't think they had. Uniforms weren't the flavour of showy nonsense he preferred.

"We should get him out," Tony said, still peering at the man's face. He had died screaming. "He should be buried, in Arlington or, or something. Not..."

Tony had seen the preserved and decaying remains of hundreds of bodies over the years, even created some himself. It shouldn't have hit him so deeply, this one man forever trapped. Maybe it was just that Tony couldn't usually see the eyes of the dead.

"His eyes shouldn't have frozen like that," Tony said. The ice was clear as glass, almost, and Tony could see that the man's eyes were blue and perfect. Tony couldn't help but wonder what they'd looked like when they were alive. They looked like eyes that would sparkle and laugh, but maybe that was all in his head. Tony did have trouble not imagining the best of a pretty face, no matter how many lessons to the contrary the world insisted on giving him.

"We'd need some pretty big equipment to move this," Rhodey said. He was eyeing up the dimensions of the block of ice, and running the math in his head. "Has to be at least three thousand pounds."

"Sure," Tony said. He was thinking about trying to melt it here, but wasn't sure if that would work at all in this place. Whatever was keeping the ice displays frozen had some very real power behind it. He also didn't want to leave the man in the ice for a minute longer than he had to, no matter how ridiculous that sentiment was, given that he'd likely been there for seventy years. "Let's keep going."

Rhodey dragged himself away, his naturalist's curiosity clearly making him want to study every display they passed. The hall stretched on for another hundred yards, and the further down it they went, the stranger the contents of the cases became. There was a little red raccoon creature that Tony didn't recognise, and rhinovirus the size of a wild boar, a large dolphin with tusks like a walrus.

"Wait, sir, that's a..." Rhodey started to say, but Tony wasn't slowing down, forcing to Rhodey keep following him, counting cases as he jogged. "There's gotta be five hundred of these things," he said as they neared the end.

Tony nodded. He knew Rhodey wanted to spend a year down here documenting all this, but they needed to find out the source of Fury's lights, and now they needed to find a way to thaw out the man in ice.

At the end of the corridor, the space widened into a circular room. The walls had a series of boxes on them, each with markings like Tony remembered from the capstone they'd deciphered to get into the tunnel system in the first place. A quick study of the walls showed Tony that that each square likely corresponded to a block of ice, and all Tony had to do was count off until he found the one representing the block containing the man.

"Sir, do you think we should..." Rhodey started to say, but Tony was already pulling out the activation key he'd used on the capstone. It hummed just like it had before, and just like it had before the symbols he pointed it at glowed. It was intuitive, really. The feel of the device clicked inside his head.

The glowing faded, but instead of the grinding of gears, all he heard was a thump from down the corridor. Tony turned, and shone his flashlight back the way he'd come, but could only see the shadows and reflected light of the ice.

It was also reflecting on the expanding puddle on the floor. Seemed like the tunnel wasn't perfectly level after all. Tony ran back up hill, huffing a little in the cold air, Rhodey echoing his steps behind him. His feet splashed in the water, which was already starting to form a coat of ice. The beam of his flashlight jerked as he moved, and he made himself hold it steady.

The light cast through the remaining block of ice and made the puddle seem sickly and green. The man who'd been in the now-melted block prison was lying face-down on the floor, one arm twisted under him, the other still reaching forward.

"We're going to have to carry him out of here," Rhodey commented, sounding tired already. "And we still don't know... oh holy shit!"

Tony was having the exact same thought as he dropped to his knees in the icy water. The man was moving. It had to be a trick, just the flickering light, or his cloths settling, but it wasn't. Tony put his hand on the man's back and felt it rise and fall. The breathing was shallow, but definitely there.

"He's alive!" Tony said, rather redundantly as the man was groaning now. "Help me roll him over."

Rhodey was already kneeling next to Tony, and together they got a hold of the man's coat and flipped him to his back. He was already blinking awake, staring up at the roof of the tunnel, before he eyes fell on Tony's face.

"Where..." he started to say, but his throat was clearly too worn to talk.

Tony pulled out his hip flask and poured a nip of whisky between the man's lips. That seemed to revive him enough that he reached up and caught Tony's wrist before he could administer a second dose.

"Where's Bucky?" the man demanded. He had a deep voice with a New York Irish lean to it.

"Um..." Tony said.

"Who's Bucky, Captain?" Rhodey asked, and the man's eyes snapped to him.

"My friend, he..." the man blinked, looked between Rhodey and Tony, then licked his lips and reformed his question. "Where am I?"

"Roanoke, North Carolina," Tony said. His mind was still spinning from the unexpectedness of all this. He'd thought that he and Rhodey would be lugging the handsome stranger to the surface in order to arrange a proper military funeral. Not having his living, albeit freezing cold, hand holding Tony in place like a vice. He hadn't expected to be explaining where they were to a man frozen in time. "Captain," Tony said, echoing Rhodey's assessment of his rank, "Do you remember what the date is?"

The man looked between them again, and hesitated. Did he not remember, or was he trying to hide how much he knew? "March thirtieth," he said, then after another beat. "1865."

"Sir," Rhodey said carefully, "It's August the fourth, 1940."

The man started to shake his head, then something in his expression set. Tony only saw trouble coming a second before the man moved, and when he moved, it was so fast that Tony had no time to react. The man shoved Tony back into Rhodey, knocking them both into the puddle then sprang to his feet and pelted up the tunnel towards the surface.

"I was going to break it more gently than that," Tony muttered as he untangled himself from Rhodey.

"How's that, exactly?" Rhodey asked, but instead of waiting for an answer, he hauled them both to their feet. Tony's clothes had soaked through and were freezing to his skin, but the sprint back up the passage warmed him up.

It'd taken Tony long enough to start the pursuit that the man had clambered out of the tunnels and was standing on the surface looking around by the time Tony caught up with him.

Tony's eyes swept the horizon, trying to see the world through the eyes of a man from seventy years ago. A handful of destroyers were chugging up outside Nags Head, making their way back into Norfolk, their diesels loud over the still water. The little plane Rhodey and Tony had come in on was parked on the islands main road about twenty yards away, an alien sculpture in the eyes of a nineteenth-century man. Steel bridges joined Roanoke to both Nags Head and the mainland.

"They're the new ironclads," Tony said, nodding to the warships past the barrier islands, "But made of steel, now."

"Are we at war?" the man asked, then, all in a tumble, "Are we still at war, with the rebels, or is the Union restored? Are you a freedman? Where's Bucky? How am I alive after so long? Who are you?"

Tony held up his hands and gave the man his most disarming smile. "My name's Tony Stark; this is James Rhodes; no one's a slave any more, and if you hold on a minute, I'll get to the rest as best I can. Inside. With a cup of coffee and a change of clothes."

The man nodded slowly. He was hugging himself against the wind off the sound, and still didn't look like he quite believed anything that was going on, but he wasn't running away either, so Tony was going to count that in the victory column. "My name's Steven Rogers," he said. "Special Detachment. 51st New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment."

"Good to meet you," Tony said. He wanted to be able to lift the confusion from his new friend's eyes, to make the world something he could understand, maybe even love like Tony did. The pull towards him felt like more than just Tony's usually attraction to a pretty face, and more than a rescuer's empathy for a lost puppy, but what exactly it was, Tony couldn't yet put to words. He crossed to Rogers and put an arm around his shoulders. He was shivering hard enough to feel though his jacket and overcoat. "Come on. Let's get somewhere..."

"Sir!" Rhodey cut in, and when Tony looked back at him, he was staring up.

Tony followed his gaze. He still had his arm around Rogers' shoulder, and could feel his breathing quicken.

"The sky was clear when I came up," Rogers said, not sounding sure.

"It definitely was," Tony agreed. Or, if not completely clear, there hadn't been a purple-black cloud generating right over the island, blotting out the sun.

"Think we're about to find out where those lights were coming form?" Rhodey asked. He pulled his pistol and took a step closer to Tony.

"Might be," Tony agreed. He was liking the idea of making a run for the plane, personally, and regretting that Jarvis and his Armour were back in New York. He still hadn't let go of Rogers' shoulders.

"Lights?" Rogers asked. "We were sent here to investigate strange lights the freedmen reported."

"And we're going to want to hear all about that, sir," Rhodey said, already sprinting towards the plane.

Tony started pulling Rogers after Rhodey "Tell me, Captain Rogers," he said as they went, "have you ever wanted to fly?"

There wasn't time to look at Rogers properly, but Tony caught a flash of his grin. "Always been a dream I've had," Rogers said. He scrambled in behind Rhodey with admirable celerity.

The plane's engine turned over; the clouds opened up, and they flew.


End file.
